Supporting STM in Distributed Systems: Mechanisms and a Java Framework

The authors present HyFlow - a Distributed Software Transactional Memory (D-STM) framework for distributed concurrency control. Lock-based concurrency control suffers from drawbacks including deadlocks, live locks, and scalability and composability challenges. These problems are exacerbated in distributed systems due to their distributed versions which are more complex to cope with (e.g., distributed deadlocks). STM and D-STM are promising alternatives to lock-based and distributed lock-based concurrency control for centralized and distributed systems, respectively, that overcome these difficulties.